Jeff Myhre

What to Expect from The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah

I am old enough to remember when Jay Leno took over the Tonight Show from Johnny Carson. It was recognized at the time as the end of an era. But Leno did his thing, and because of that, it was the beginning of an era as well.

We’re looking at the same phenomenon on the Daily Show as South African Trevor Noah follows Jon Stewart, who (let’s face it) can’t be replaced. I miss the Stewart era, but I am looking forward to Noah’s time in the host’s chair. I have been a fan of Noah’s for a couple of years now, and if you haven’t seen his work, you owe it to yourself to track down his HBO special and some of the YouTube clips out there.

The first thing to note is that the show is going to be different in its approach. We’re all different people, and Noah is coming from a different time and place than Stewart. As Noah told Entertainment Weekly, he is a “31-year-old half-black, half-white South African man who immigrated to the United States in 2011 and Stewart (as a 52-year-old Jewish man who grew up in New Jersey). “The way we look at the same story will be completely different,” he said. “We have different access to different jokes, different sides, different sensitivities … the most important thing is the place that you come from.”

“We’re still dealing with the same issues, it’s just a different angle we’re looking at things from—and it’s my angle, really. I’m taking things in a slightly different direction, but to the same endpoint.”

Noah speaks seven languages and does some of the best accents and impersonations I have ever seen. So, you’ll see more of that. As an immigrant, he’s got a different take on America than a native, and as a man of mixed-race heritage from a country that abolished legal segregation in his lifetime, he has the standing to talk to us about race.

My friend, Gys de Villiers is a South African actor (he played de Klerk opposite Idris Elba’s Nelson Mandela in “Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom) who explained, “Because of his mixed race, he can say things in South Africa that an Afrikaaner like me or a Zulu might not be able to and have the same credibility. Like Obama, he’s neither one nor the other and so he can speak to both.”

Noah himself told Rolling Stone that his show will wind up coming from a more diverse group than the previous incarnation of the Daily Show did. “Already we have people coming in and the racial diversity of the correspondents has gone up dramatically …. Gender-wise, we’ve got a ton of great female writers, too. In the new submissions, 40 percent of the final writers we decided to go with are female. And finding those voices is difficult but we’re lucky in that I’ve worked with great people of every color and I’ve worked with fantastic female writers as well. So we’re bringing that into the room.”

One thing that will feature in his Daily Show that Stewart’s didn’t is New York City itself. Like just about every newcomer, he’s got observations about the city, how people behave, and of course, the subway (he reckons it would be a great opportunity for us all to discuss climate change). Stewart, a Jersey boy, took much of the comedy potential of the city for granted.

One tiny hint – -don’t just watch the first episode and make a decision. The first week will be a four-part miniseries, so you’ll have to at least watch for the whole week.

New New Yorkers: Gys and Jaci de Villiers, South African Theatre Folk

by Jeff Myhre

The 19th Annual New York Fringe Festival just wrapped up another successful orgy of theatre for those who didn’t leave the City for the last half of August. There were 185 shows, and while I didn’t get to more than a handful, my favorite was a one-man show called FAFI, which is a coming-of-age production about a white South African boy growing up under apartheid. The actor, Gys de Villiers, and the director, his wife Jaci de Villiers, wrote the work together, and it premiered at the festival. In their native South Africa, they are very well-known for their work on stage, TV and in film. Internationally, Gys portrayed F.W de Klerk in “Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom” opposite Idris Elba.

They have recently immigrated to New York. For New Yorkers, going to Africa would be an adventure, but they see the adventure in going the other direction. They came here about four years ago on holiday and stayed in Williamsburg in Brooklyn. They loved it and eventually, decided to try their luck here.

For those of us who have been here a while and have become a bit jaded, their enthusiasm for New York is a breath of fresh air.

Jaci explained, “Artists are respected here, and while there is a lot of very keen competition, it’s a very healthy environment for creative people.” She’s right – sometimes, we take that for granted.

They have been married 9 years, together for 13 years. They met in the theatre, and there was a professional and personal attraction. For a great many couples, working together puts you in the fast lane to divorce court, but the de Villiers are different. Gys says, “Working together increases intimacy. We come home after rehearsals or a performance and we just keep going over things.” Jaci echoes this saying, “Making the work better makes the marriage work.”

Their process is pretty straightforward. Gys says, “For FAFI, and almost all of our work, I threw loads of ideas onto paper and Jaci took that and provided a structure and added her own perspective.”

They created the backbone of FAFI while in New York four years ago, and developed the piece for the stage when they decided to move here.

They translated the piece into Afrikaans and performed a version of it two months ago in SA because the audience there knows all about the apartheid system the country had, it instructs a bit less. And it is considered controversial in some quarters.

Gys told me “Twenty years after the segregation of the races ended, there are still some people in my white Afrikaans-speaking community who believe apartheid wasn’t a bad system and that it will even make a comeback. I think its delusional to think that way, but they do, and my views challenge their identity.”

Gys was an artist back in the 1980s working at The Market Theatre known for its “Anti-Apartheid Struggle” plays, while Mandela was still in jail. Yet their work doesn’t feel like a political piece.

“FAFI is a very personal one. It’s my life story, scenes from it anyway. But in a place like South Africa was, the political is very personal in many ways,” Gys says.

Jaci points out that the brainwashing young Afrikaaners got was pretty rigorous, and it was really being drafted into the Army that had the most impact on Gys, whose attitudes about race evolved from a very conservative background.

“Yes, I was being trained to kill my fellow South Africans because they were black and that training, being property of the state like that, it sealed the deal.”

Now that they have their Green Cards (a multi-year process that required the assistance of an immigration lawyer), securing union membership and an agent are the next challenges. Gys met with one agent who said, “What am I going to do with that accent?” Well, he has a definite South African accent, and he is realistic that it will influence the roles he can get. His attitude is a pretty positive one, though, “I don’t mind being the seventh Russian on the left. I am here to work.”

And you may well see them Off-Broadway before too long. Jaci told me, “America is the land of opportunity, so we are developing a few productions of our own, FAFI is the first of several.”

In five years, they can become citizens. They look forward to being African-Americans.

NSA’s Phone Data Collecting is Worse than Illegal, It’s Ineffective

by Jeff Myhre

NSA, Manhattan Digest — Credit to: Watchdog

Civil libertarians on the right and the left have latched onto the report from the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board into the NSA’s program that collects data on phone calls. The NSA’s collection of phone records under Section 215 of the Patriot Act “implicates constitutional concerns under the First and Fourth Amendments, raises serious threats to privacy and civil liberties as a policy matter, and has shown only limited value,” the report argued. “As a result, the board recommends that the government end the program.”

Those who dislike the NSA and its program have started screaming that it’s illegal, just like they have said all along. The fact that the Board approved this report on a vote of 3-2 makes that a bit less certain. Moreover, the two dissenters served in the administration of George W. Bush, so they have the interests of the security community in mind.

Those who defend the program argue that the Board went beyond its brief in declaring the program illegal. Congressman Mike Rogers (R-MI) chairman of the House intelligence committee, sent out an email today that read in part, “In 38 times over the past seven years, 17 federal judges have examined this issue and found the telephone metadata program to be legal, concluding this program complies with both the statutory text and with the U.S. Constitution. I don’t believe the Board should go outside its expertise to opine on the effectiveness of counterterrorism programs.”

I happen to think the congressman is onto something here. Rather than worry about whether the Board went too far or whether the program is illegal or unconstitutional, let’s start with whether or not it works.

The term “has shown only limited value” is a Beltway manner of saying, “ain’t worth spit.” It leaves enough wiggle room in case, by some miracle, the program does find a bad guy. However, since it hasn’t (or they’d point to the case or cases where it did), the Board is OK with shutting it down.

When it comes to fighting terrorism, we have done a pretty lousy job at fighting smart. We’re good at sending the marines everywhere, and drone attacks are safe and satisfying if your blood lust is up. But when it comes to saying “that’s a waste of resources,” America has a lousy record. That’s why we’re building another air craft carrier and more submarines when our enemies are hiding in the mountains of Pakistan.

The first question is to ask is “will this work?” If the answer is “no,” then we need not go any further. When you’re looking for a needle in a haystack, a strategy that makes the haystack bigger (as the gathering of all the phone data does) is not going to work. Indeed, it will prove counterproductive. That being the case, who cares if it’s legal? We shouldn’t bother with it anyway.

Did the Russians Dupe Snowden?

by Jeff Myhre

A new book by a writer who has covered eastern Europe for 30 years suggests that Edward Snowden, the NSA leaker, could have been an unwitting agent for the Russian security service, the SVR. The Snowden Operation: Inside the West’s Greatest Intelligence Disaster is a must read if you have any interest in this case at all.

Edward Lucas is senior editor at the Economist and was the only English-language reporter in Prague when the anti-communist revolution swept Czechoslovakia in the late 1980s. He knows how that part of the world works and is particularly knowledgeable about how espionage services operate there. He never produces a smoking gun, but his argument is consistent with the facts and with the known behavior of the SVR and its forerunner the KGB.

There are four ways an intelligence officer (a person who works for the SVR, CIA, MI6 whatever) can recruit an agent (someone who supplies information – note the distinction. James Bond was an intelligence officer not an agent). The acronym is MICE: money, ideology, compromise and ego. You can bribe someone, ask them to “help the cause,” blackmail them with whatever you can find, and/or appeal to their sense of pride (“they don’t appreciate you, but we do.”).

In the case of Snowden, Lucas posits that he was motivated by ideology, but under a “false flag.” A false flag means that a person is recruited by an intelligence service but believes he is helping a different organization or cause. One of the most common ways the KGB did this during the Cold War was recruiting Jews by pretending to be from Israel’s Mossad. False flag recruitments are rather common in the espionage world and are favored by the Russians (and the Soviets before them).

Did the Russians Dupe Snowden?

The hypothesis here is that Snowden was tricked into believing he was helping the cause of open government, personal freedom, Mom and apple pie. In this, he was a “useful idiot” to borrow Lenin’s term.

Lucas then traces timelines and connections to Glenn Greenwald, Jacob Appelbaum and Laura Poitras, illustrating how these individuals could have unwittingly helped the SVR develop Snowden as an agent.

Would a prosecutor get a conviction with this evidence in a court of law? I don’t think so, and to be fair, neither does Lucas. However, the facts as we know them all fit. The conclusion is that you can’t rule out the possibility and this explanation of what happened is more likely to be true than any other.

SmartMetric’s Bitcoin Biometric Card Brings Bitcoin Mainstream

by Jeff Myhre

Manhattan, Manhattan Digest, Bitcoin — Credit to: Gamestop

By Ray Dirks

With $11 billion worth of bitcoin in circulation today, the digital currency offers promise as the new global currency of the digital age. However, bitcoin faces many challenges including security, before more people start to use it. A company called SmartMetric (OTCQB:SMME) just announced it is set to launch its SmartMetric Biometric Bitcoin Card. It’s the patented nano-computing and fingerprint technology invented by SmartMetric that makes their smartcard the kind of solution that is sorely needed for bitcoin to become more widely adopted.

SmartMetric has created the smallest fingerprint reader in the world, which fits on a standard sized credit or debit card. It reads a fingerprint in less than one second and the card only works if the fingerprint matches the owner’s. Couple this with the company’s nano-sized motherboard and processors to create a tiny computer all on a card. The company describes this as a “quantum leap in card authentication in the payments industry”.

The nano-computer on the card enables storage and transfer of bitcoins. The cards are fully compatible with any ATM. You can visit the bitcoin-friendly coffee shop down the street and use your bitcoins on a card to purchase a cup of coffee. Or you can stop by the ATM and withdraw dollars at the equivalent of that day’s bitcoin-to-dollar exchange rate. This is bitcoin on a smartcard with more security than any payment card has ever offered.

Despite its cryptography, security has been a big problem for bitcoin. Bitcoins stored on online wallets have been stolen or destroyed through a number of cyber-attacks. A major impediment for broader adoption is that people are concerned bitcoins cannot be stored securely.

A very thorough and detailed list of Bitcoin heists is presented on a forum called bitcoitalk.org. Digital thieves have been quite busy. The Verge recently ran an article titled, “How to steal Bitcoin in 3 easy steps,” Basically, bicoins are just like cash. Unlike conventional money in a bank account or on a debit card, which may be insured and come with certain levels of guarantees and security from a bank, once bitcoins are stolen or lost, they are gone.

What bitcoin needs in order to become widely accepted and used as a global currency in addition to security is ease of transfer between currency holders, broader acceptance among businesses and retailers both online and more perhaps more importantly offline, and stability. The last factor, stability, will only come after we see significant advancement in the first three factors.
Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke recently took a position on bitcoin stating in a letter to the U.S. Senate noting that bitcoin may “hold long-term promise… if the innovations promote a faster, more secure and more efficient payment system.” SmartMetric’s card may be the first key innovation to really move the currency forward and outward into the mainstream.

More investors are taking a position in SmartMetric. The company announced on Friday that it plans to launch the card in the first quarter of 2014. Although a number of privately held start-ups have recently garnered attention for getting big venture capital bucks, for retail investors looking to participate in the potential upside of the bitcoin phenomenon, there seems to be a dearth of investment opportunities. SmartMetric may be the only public company going after the bitcoin opportunity.
SmartMetric’s breakthrough nano-computing and biometric security technologies, converging with the where bitcoin is in emergence, is serendipitous timing for the currency and the card provider.
A growing number of online retailers are now accepting the currency. Amazon is certainly not there yet. However, some mainstream retailers are coming on board. U.S. online retailer, Overstock.com (NASDAQ:OSTK) just announced on Thursday it will begin to accept bitcoins. Overstock reported that in its first 22 hours of accepting the digital currency, it accepted 800 orders in bitcoin, worth a total of about $126,000.

On Friday Singapore became one of the first countries to issue guidance on bitcoin taxation for businesses. A global map representing the regulatory stance of countries towards bitcoin, unsurprisingly, shows that free market economies have been permissive of the virtual currency. Fortunately these economies also happen account for most of the world’s wealth.
According to a Bloomberg poll published last month, 42% of Americans knew that bitcoin is a virtual currency. As a generous guestimate, if 1% of Americans currently have bitcoins, a 42% awareness in the general public is pretty impressive.

A recent New York Times article quoted Chris Dixon, a partner at Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Dixon said of bitcoin, “It’s one of the five best computer science ideas of the last 40 years.” Bitcoin may just be here to stay. SmartMetric may be the company with the nano-computing biometric technology that make it mainstream accessible on a payment card.

New York’s First Lady Will Have Major Influence in Manhattan Politics

by Jeff Myhre

Chirlane McCray, the wife of New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, is going to have a major role in Manhattan Politics and this new administration. While the mayor has declined to define her role with any precision, she’s going to be more like Hilary Clinton or Michelle Obama as the wife of the chief executive than Laura Bush or Rosalyn Carter.

That isn’t to say that Mrs. Bush and Mrs. Carter had no influence but rather that they operated behind the scenes. Any married man will tell you that a wife doesn’t need an office and a chief of staff to have influence. The question is how overt that influence will be. Mrs. McCray’s role is not going to be backstage.

Manhattan Politics NYC First Lady — Credit: Kelly Weill

McCray has just appointed Rachel Noerdlinger as her chief of staff – a woman who has been near the top of Al Sharpton’s operation. Her $170,000 annual salary is less than the $205,180 that city commissioners in charge of agencies get. Still, it’s hefty.

The mayor said “We utilized the model from the last person who had a similar role, which was Donna Hanover, who obviously was very active as chief of staff. So we looked at how her staffing was done and we’ve tried to base it on that model,” de Blasio said. Hanover, for those who don’t recall, was Mrs. Giuliani – who had a chief of staff, a press officer and two assistants.

Another signal that McCray is not going to operate behind the scenes came on Dr. King’s Birthday, when she spoke at Sharpton’s celebratory event. Speaking roles there are almost exclusively reserved for elected politicians.

However, the real reason to expect the mayor’s wife to be front and center on certain issues is her professional background. She entered politics in 1991 as a speechwriter for then-mayoy David Dinkins, a role she also held for state comptroller Carl McCall and city comptroller Bill Thompson. While Clinton was in office, she was a public affairs specialist at the New York Foreign Press Center. She also has private sector experience with 5 years with Maimonides Medical Center, and a six month stint at Citigroup’s PR department, which she herself said was “not a good fit.”

In an interview with Elle magazine, candidate de Blasio said “Chirlane’s been part of every major strategic decision in this campaign from day one. Literally. We started with an idea, and then we had to choose the core of our personnel, and then we had to choose our core ideas and message. Every part of it, every meeting that mattered.”

Her personality predisposes her to an active role, her experience and talents prove she has contributions to make, and the mayor has learned to rely on her. Her role in city government is going to be significant.

Blasio’s First 100 Days: Don’t Expect Amount to Much | Political News

by Jeff Myhre

When FDR became president in 1933, the country was suffering in the Great Depression. The Hoover administration either did nothing or the wrong thing, and the nation needed action. FDR delivered with 15 major bills in the first 100 days. And ever since then, “the first 100 days” has been a big deal with journalists and talking heads whenever a new guy gets elected. While I am a big fan of New York’s new mayor, I don’t expect him to deliver much on the four big promises he made during the campaign – largely because that delivery is in the hands of others.

Let’s look at the promises first. He wants to tax the super rich to pay for universal pre-kindergarten education and after-school programs for middle-schoolers. Then, he promised to create more housing for the middle and working classes by making property developers add it to their new plans – no affordable housing, no construction permits. Also, he promised a stronger paid sick leave law. And of course, there’s stop-and-frisk, which he promised to reform.

OK, hands up, who is against universal pre-K and after-school activities for our junior high school kids? No one is against them, but paying for them by taxing those earnings a quarter of a million a year annoys those rich folks. Still, we’ve got Mr. de Blasio in Gracie Mansion and his hand-picked Speaker of the City Council Melissa Mark-Viverito commands a huge majority on the council. It’s a done deal, right? Wrong. The state legislature has the power of the purse here, and I don’t know if the upstate Republicans will approve it. Besides, Albany doesn’t move fast even when there is bipartisan support for a bill.

Forcing real estate developers to create more affordable housing won’t happen in the first 100 days either. First, New York construction in winter doesn’t move that fast. And the developers are really good at weaseling out of their commitments. When Developer Forest City Ratner put up the Barclay Center in Brooklyn, part of the deal was 2,200 units of affordable housing. The Nets and Billy Joel have played at the Barclay Center, but the 2,200 units have yet to appear.

A better paid sick leave law will get passed but there are some corporate interests and entrepreneurs rabidly opposed to it. The city council will have to fight its way through their obstructionism. There will probably be hearings, studies and the usual delaying tactics, so this won’t get done in the first 100 days either.

When it comes to stop and frisk, that stupid policing tactic that allows cops to stop anyone and demand proof of innocence, the Mayor has but to give the order. His new police commissioner Bill Bratton needs no enabling legislation. He just has to inform the NYPD that stop and frisk is over, case closed.

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and a new New York will take a while. Let’s be patient while the mayor works his way through the state legislature and the city council. As for stop and frisk, he’s going to lose a supporter if it’s still the way things are done in April.

New York City Council Elects First Latina Speaker Despite Scandal

by Jeff Myhre

Wednesday afternoon, the New York City Council unanimously elected Melissa Mark-Viverito as its new Speaker. She is the first Hispanic to hold the position. She is also very close to the new mayor, Bill de Blasio. Her election marks a major defeat for the county party bosses and a triumph for the progressive caucus on the council. Now, if her financial disclosure problems will go away, all will be well.

About the NYC Council Speaker

The Speaker’s job is the second most important in the city government after the mayor. While the Public Advocate is first in line in the event the mayor can’t complete his term, the Speaker controls the city’s legislative agenda and committee appointments. Annoy the Speaker, and you’re effectiveness on the council is greatly diminished.

For that reason, Mark-Viverito won unanimous support. Daniel Garodnick was her only real challenger up until shortly before the vote. Garodnik won a standing ovation for withdrawing at the last minute and saying “In the spirit of strengthening the Council, which animated my candidacy from the start, I want to formally concede to the next speaker of the City Council, my colleague, Melissa Mark-Viverito.” She had the votes, and putting his supporters on record as opposing her was political folly.

The progressive caucus and the Brooklyn Democratic Party, in a deal brokered by Mayor de Blasio, put together a majority despite the best efforts of the Queens Democratic boss Congressman Joe Crowley. Once this was done, the only thing Garodnik could do was a find a graceful exit – which he did. And since Carolyn Maloney is not running for re-election to Congress, expect Crowley to support him for the seat (and don’t be surprised if Mark-Viverito helps him, too – she’ll be glad to get rid of a rival).

Real Estate Scandel Information

Mark-Viverito does have a small problem stemming from property she owns and the city’s requirement that city council members (and 8,000 other people who get city paychecks) disclose various facts about their finances. The Daily News reported “She has been dogged by controversy in recent days after the Daily News reported that she rented out apartments in an E. 111th St. building she owns without reporting the income on city financial disclosure forms, and she still has not released her tax returns to clarify whether she reported the income to the IRS.”

In the absence of hard evidence of wrong-doing, I am prepared to say this was an oversight and that if she puts the paper work in order (and pays any appropriate fines), the issue will fade. However, if Joe Crowley gets a lever from this to use against her, her speakership might be short-lived.

Global Politics in 2014 – A Look Ahead

by Jeff Myhre

When the new year comes in, optimism is the order of the day – hope that the next 12 months will be better than the last 12. In international relations, that optimism is usually unfounded. The truth is 2014 is probably going to look a lot like 2013 did, and 2013 was a rather middling year. It won’t be as bad as 1939 when Europe began incinerating itself, but it won’t look much like 1989 when communism’s collapse became inevitable. What we’re looking at this year is muddling through some rather tricky issues.

North Korea is a perennial worry, and it has gotten worse since Kim Jong-Un inherited his father’s job as dictator for life. He’s not quite 30, and he has just executed his uncle, who had been his mentor. He has called back numerous diplomats and business people from abroad and purges are underway. What’s scary here is that, even without nuclear weapons, North Korea could easily destroy most of South Korea (one of the world’s most important economies). Any attack would put America and China in the mix, and that won’t end well. Containment is never a popular policy, but it’s the only one we’ve got with North Korea.

Iran is less of a worry, but because certain factions in the west and in Iran would like nothing more than continued tension (or even war), the place is a potential trouble spot. The Iranian nuclear program lies at the heart of the matter, and the truth is that Iran doesn’t have the makings of The Bomb, and probably can’t get the necessary weapons-grade uranium 235 in the next year. The deal made last year that stalls things for the next 6 months is crucial to diffusing this mess. I am betting calmer heads prevail, but that isn’t a guarantee.

The Islamic world is in the midst of a major theological-political struggle between the Sunni variety of the faith (which includes rather nasty people like Al Qaeda) and the Shia variety (Iran, Hezbollah). The difficult thing here for those of us who aren’t Muslims is that we really don’t have a dog in the fight, but it is a fight – people are dying in the Middle East over it. The humanitarian impulse to help is going to bump up against the unpleasant fact that there is almost nothing we can do to resolve the matter one way or another. A similar fight happened in Europe between the Catholics and the Protestants, the Thirty Years War. The Muslims won’t resolve their differences any faster.

Then, there is Pakistan, which part of the Sunni Islamic camp. It is ostensibly an ally of the United States and its intelligence services set up the Taliban in the first place as a way to keep India out of Afghanistan. And remember, Pakistan is where Osama bin Laden hid out for years. With allies like this, America doesn’t need enemies. As the US scales down its troop levels in Afghanistan, Pakistan will start throwing its weight around there a bit more.

Russia is not the problem it was a generation ago, but Vladimir Putin is trying to play great power when, in fact, Russia is a third tier nation at best. The real problem Russia has is a demographic time-bomb; a declining population will restrict its economic and military options in the future, and Putin is fighting a rear guard action with Russian nationalism, homophobia, and the weapons trade (Russia is Syria’s biggest supplier of weapons). Russia is playing games in eastern Europe, and there is just too much that can go wrong.

Of course, these are the obvious flashpoints, and if history teaches us anything, it’s that the biggest troubles don’t come from foreseeable disaster but from complete surprises. Happy 2014 anyway.

Jeff Myhre

Did the Russians Dupe Snowden?

About the NYC Council Speaker

Real Estate Scandel Information

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